Welcome BPC Scrapbookers to The Hunger Games Scrapbooking Challenge #1: Main Characters. Let the Games Begin!

Hello Scrapbookers! I am Katie Scott, a long time fan of Big Picture Classes, an avid scrapbooker and blogger, and a busy working mom who only recently found time to read some fiction books. After originally thinking they sounded violent, I was reluctantly intrigued by the Hunger Games preview, and eventually read the books. After reading them, I knew I wanted to scrapbook the experience of reading these novels in some way.

Want to play along? Here's how:

Step 1. CHOOSE A FICTIONAL CHARACTER AND COMPARE WITH A REAL LIFE PERSON.

I chose myself and Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games. You could choose yourself or another person you love and pair them up with a fictional character, it doesn't have to be from The Hunger Games. For example, if I were to do this for members of my family, I might compare my son, Mac, with the boy from the No, David books by David Shannon; I might compare my daughter, Allison, with the ever creative and social pig named Olivia from the book series with the same name; and I might compare my husband, Charlie, to (hmmmmm) I'm not sure, maybe Jimmy Buffet or Alec Baldwin (I think celebrity personalities could count).

STEP 2. CHOOSE COMPARISON PHOTOS:

I found some photos of The Hunger Games' main character, Katniss Everdeen, on the internet and some photos of myself at about her age from the 80s. I picked one full body shot with weapons (amazingly enough I had a photo of myself as a teenager with a statue of Posideon and his trident) and one head shot with a more serious face for each of us. I scanned in my old photos. Then, I created a photo collage in Picasa. I would have put Katniss all on the left and me all on the right, except that I wanted our faces to be facing inward; I don't think Picasa has the mirror flip feature so I mixed them up our photos, I actually think it is a bit more interesting this way.

Step 3: COMPARE AND CONTRAST:

This part of the process sort of reminds me of high school English class when we had to write an essay comparing and contrasting something. For this layout, I created a table in Word Perfect listing the similarities between Katniss and myself – it really was funny to see our common threads. Choose categories to compare according to what the similarities are; you could start with basic demographic information like name, age, place of residence, and then go into education and life experiences, and whatever categories would be interesting to compare like taste in music, phobias, and special talents.

STEP 4: CHOOSE SCRAPBOOKING PRODUCTS TO SUPPORT YOUR THEME.

Once I had my table and photos printed, I knew I wanted to create an 8 ½” x 11” page. Because my table and photos were big, I knew I didn't have a lot of space for embellishments or the title. I wanted the photos and the table to shine and for the rest to support my theme. I found appropriate patterned paper and title stickers, and added some machine stitching to "jazz up" my page. That gave me the idea for the title: "Common Threads" so I stitched over my title letters as well and along the bottom of the photos with the zigzag stitch under the head shot photos.

STEP 5: SHARE YOUR WORK!

I would love to see what you create with this challenge, upload your page to the Big Picture Classes Student Sharing Gallery, and please leave a comment with a link to your page.

Anxiously awaiting the release of the movie The Hunger Games, your friend and fellow scrapbooker,

Katie Scott.

P.S. You can follow along with The Hunger Games Scrapbooking Challenge series on my blog, we are visiting each of the 13 Districts in the imaginary dystopian world of Panem from The Hunger Games to find scrapbooking inspiration from everything from coal to cows to lumberjacks. I also have video links which explain the inspiration concepts from the districts in greater detail and in which I explain my theory of using principles of improvisational comedy as applied to scrapbooking. It is a lot of somewhat random scrapbooking fun. You can also join in with me on Facebook.